Incubators of Knowledge: Predicting protege productivity and impact in the social sciences

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral education plays a pivotal role in shaping the careers of future scholars and, thereby, in making an impact on the trajectory of knowledge creation in a nation. During a doctoral program, students are acculturated to the norms of the discipline, learning scholarly practices and behaviors that guide them for a lifetime. Advisors, as guides to these scholarly journeymen, serve as critical gatekeepers to the discipline and can have a profound influence on their doctoral students. Doctoral students comprise a larger portion of the academic workforce, yet scholars have very little knowledge of their place in scholarly networks, the degree to which they contribute to scholarly output, and the impact of this output. Very little quantitative analysis shows the relationship between advisors' scholarly practices and the future success of their advisees. This study investigates these issues from two main angles: understanding the contribution of doctoral students to social-science research (the extent and character of this contribution) and the impact of this research (visibility through citations); and examining the advisor's knowledge base and knowledge-diffusion practices, and whether these factors are involved in expanding knowledge frontiers and how they relate to the career trajectories and future success of doctoral students. This approach allows quantification of advisor behaviors and documentation of patterns within advisee behaviors. This research thus produces a viable framework for predicting advisee success based on advisor qualities and individual students' publication practices in the course of their doctoral studies. This predictive model can then be used by science policy makers and administrators for more efficient allocation of resources and to identify ways to promote innovation in higher education. This work supports a quantitative-based understanding of contribution of doctoral students to the creation of knowledge and of the relationship between the scholarly practices of advisors and the productivity and impact of their proteges. Such a model will also enhance our understanding of how the different scientific practices of the advisors -- including their embeddedness in particular disciplines, degree of mobility among different disciplines, and involvement in highly collaborative interdisciplinary work -- will have an effect on the career trajectories and scientific success of their advisees. The combination of multiple datasets and the innovative analyses in this first research study on proteges provides a rich foundation for the development of new metrics and evaluations of knowledge diffusion, scholarly productivity, and scientific impact in doctoral education. Broader Impacts: Educational opportunities are provided through the funding of students and the integration of this project into the classroom. In addition, this research provides a platform for future analyses on the interaction of mentoring in doctoral education with individual protege characteristics. The research products of this work will be disseminated at national and international conferences and workshops. The process of matching heterogeneous datasets, as well as the datasets themselves, will be detailed and made available online in order to enhance replicability and enable other scientists to adopt and expand these approaches.